The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs: At first I thought this was linkbait but a read through the article and the other content on the blog changed my mind. There is some analysis of each blog/blogging company with details about the company, guesses on revenues and page views, future prospects, operating margins and employees, advertising statistics and finally a comment on property valuation as multiples of revenue or multiples of operating profits. From my quick glance I would say that the revenue numbers are not perfectly on the money but since these figures are almost never publicly discussed (except on make money online blogs) I guess there is some error built into the valuation. Daniel’s excellent Daily Blog Tips($1.8M) makes it into the list at number 18. The Gawker properties tops the list at a value of $150 million and other big names include TechCrunch($36M), Mashable($10M), GigaOm($8.4M) and RWW($5M). A few […]

Battle of the comment add-ons: Webware performs a comparison of six comment add-ons for WordPress and MT and puts together a list of the various features that each of them have to offer. Disqus comes out on top in their opinion.

Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins: I am a sucker for top 10 lists about WordPress, especially if they contain useful information. This list of top ten plugins put together from the experiences of a professional design firm, will help you create a full CMS out of a WordPress blog. I have used a few of these myself on various projects and their flexibility and speciality together with WordPress’ versatility and extensibility make a phenomenal combination. From the post: For moderately sized sites (including simple e-Commerce sites), WordPress does a pretty good job as a CMS, making it easy to maintain your site, and update your content. Of course, it does this best with the help of a good theme, and some great plugins. The strength of WordPress is the community of developers who have already done almost anything you can think of with it. Here are the best plugins we’ve […]

Who Comments on Blogs, and Why?: I realize there is a selection problem here: anyone who responds to my question about why commenters comment is, alas, a commenter. Which means that regular commenters will be overrepresented in the comments — unless, of course, a whole bunch of you who never comment decide to go ahead and log in and, in the comments section, tell us why you never comment. Or why other people do. I love the topic of this post on Freakonomics at the New York Times Blog. There is a lot of food for thought. There are many reasons to leave a comment on a blog and the ability of readers to leave comments on a blog and the instant interaction and conversation that develops, is what attracted me to b2 and consequently WordPress. I tend to not comment on blogs where the comment form is hard to […]

Extending WordPress Beyond the Blog: A good article on extending WordPress beyond “just a blog” with examples and a developer’s trials and tribulations along the way. Custom Fields in WordPress are the bomb. I have worked extensively with this feature set and used it to my advantage many times. WordPress Jobs makes use of the custom fields to store and produce the job listings. Our recent post on WordPress as a contact manager also uses Custom Fields. Heck there was a Contest at one point that awarded prizes to the best new use of WordPress’ Custom Fields. Along those lines, Andrew asks a question at the end of the linked article that caught my fancy and I wanted to ask our readers the same question. We might find some new uses for old code and spark new ideas. Which are your favorite non-traditional sites that use WordPress as their publishing […]

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You: You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers. I could not have described this post (on Wired) better. It is a flash animation that follows a blog post as it makes its way through the Interweb. If you ever wondered how all these disparate peices fit into the blogosphere, this is the food for thought.

Why You Need to Make a Facebook Fan Page for Your Website NOW!: An interesting bunch of reasons why you should have a Facebook page for your blog or website. Sadly, I get addicted easily and once I got into Facebook, I could not stop. I created a page for this blog, created my profile and then started looking at their API which is incredible. It is a lot of fun to dabble in Facebook apps. Also, while I am at it, I apologize to the people that received a friend request (and either did not want to add me or were surprised by the request). My address book import did not go so well. Please ignore the request if you like. If you have a Facebook page and would like some exposure, please leave a comment here or on the Facebook page for Weblog Tools Collection. Do you have […]

I have added a few plugins and tweaked a bit of the code on WeblogToolsCollection to keep things fresh and new. Here is the list. WhoSeesAds: I have been meaning to wean out the Google AdSense ads for my regular visitors and Ozh’s plugin was the ticket. If you have not used it yet, you are missing out. It is one of the finest pieces of useful and well thought out code for WordPress bloggers. I have the ads set so they only show for posts older than 30 days or if you are not a regular visitor. I like the lack of distractive AdSense blocks. There is also a distinct benefit that I had not anticipated. The best paying AdSense block on this blog has also been the most obnoxious that regular readers have complained about. I can now display those ads to people that happen to stop by […]

I decided to use Project Wonderful for a month before I would say anything about the service so that I could talk somewhat intelligently about it. Project Wonderful lets you sell ads on your blogs in a new way. They use something called an “infinite auction” model that allows you to continue to sell your ad even after it is sold one time. In other words, the ads are sold on a per day basis and the highest bidders’ ads are displayed on your blog. The system has its weaknesses but it does work. You sign up just like any other advertising service and wait for them to approve your blog. Then you decide what kind of ad blocks you would like to display, setup the code and then add the code to your blog. The process of setting up ads and displaying them is a learning experience, but more […]

About the Author

Mark Ghosh

An avid fan of business, education, technology and finance. I lead a lean, highly focussed and capable team of Java Back End developers and Front End developers through a maze of complex software wizardry to fulfill the web maintenance needs of a large chemical manufacturer. As per Myers-Briggs Personality Types, I am an ESTJ. I pride in a project completed on time and according to plan. My hobbies include all kinds of technology, anything that I can taste and anything that goes fast or flies in the air. I like to read business books and comics in my spare time.